Cell therapy: elusive as youth itself

By Paul Ferris

A rich

LONDON young man named Peter. Malcolm Stephan, who runs a London practice in "cell therapy" and is about to open up in Mexico, is another in the long line of reju-

venators who will continue to thrive as long as age and death are everyone's fate. Do you ache?

Are there wrinkles? Is your sex life slipping? Tummy upset? Memory going? Can't relax?

For a fee of around $600, the 30-year-old Stephan will treat you with the cells of unborn lambs, or a serum derived therefrom.

He is earnest as well as rich, a true believer in the scientific principles he likes to think dictate the therapy. Many visit him and claim benefits.

Like the study of faithhealing of spiritualism, the subject poses slippery questions about the patients' personalities and unconscious minds.

Cell therapy, invented in Switzerland 40 years ago and still going strong, is commercially the most successful stay-young_treatment of all time. Scientifically, it has always been a question mark.

Its inventor, the aloof and arrogant Paul Niehans, a kind of De Gaulle of medicine, was never sure how it worked. He used it against specific diseases and conditions, including anemia, heart damage, certain forms of diabetes, ⚫ blood pressure and impotence.

He claimed to develop underdeveloped bosoms and to relieve homosexual tendencies in men and women. Toward the end of his life, he announced that cell therapy helped ward off cancer.

Niehans' real fame, however, rested on his treatment of those who were

trying to overcome age.

Rumors of famous clients multiplied over the years rarely confirmed. never denied. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, Gloria Swanson, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor. Konrad Adeneauer, Bernard Baruch, Thomas Mann, Hedda Hopper, De Gaulle himself: All were said to have arrived discreetly in Switzerland at the Clinique La Prairie, near the Montreux end of Lake Geneva.

Niehaus died in 1971, at the encouraging age of 89, but his therapy lives on.

In Germany it is more or less respectable. Niehans had family connections there, and worked with German researchers at orthodox institutes, including the University of Heidelberg.

The German Society of Cell Therapists have 550 members, and claims that another 4,000 to 5.000 doc-

(Editor's Note: Paul Ferris is a London-based writer who often deals with medical subjects.)

conditions.

The foundations of cell therapy were laid in the late 19th century, when various attempts were made to put rejuvenation on a scientific basis.

Dr. Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894) the son of an Irish-American sea captain and a Frenchwoman, injected himself with an extract prepared from animal testicles, and said it made him a new man. It was 1889. Brown-Sequard was 72.

Brown-Sequard told a distinguished academic gathering in Paris that after three injections he had put the clock back 30 years.

"Today," he said, “I was able to pay a visit (a double-entendre) to the young Madame Brown-Sequard."

Thousands came to be revitalized, but his orthodox colleagues turned against him, and the dream collapsed, like all its predeces

sors.

By the present century, the idea of putting tissue from one creature into another was catching the scientific imagination.

The mysterious Dr. Serge Voronov was a serious but eccentric surgeon who pioneered the transplant of glands. His "monkey-gland” treatment, which began in 1920, had an immediate vogue.

Niehaus knew Voronov and saw him operate.

In 1920, Paul Nehans was a distinguished surgeon, aged 38, with an impeccable background. He was unusual but not yet unorthodox.

He seems to have been a gifted young man, a doctor of theology before he turned to medicine, his father's profession.

During the 1920s, he became an authority on the endocrine glands (which produce hormones) and experimented successfully with pituitary transplants.

The key episode in his life is supposed to have occurred in 1931, when he was sent for in desperation by a Lausanne clinic.

A surgeon, operating on a woman to remove her thyroid, had also removed most of the tiny parathyroids in error.

This causes the calcium level in the blood to fall, resulting in the cramplike condition of tetany, which can be fatal.

Niehans rushed to the scene and injected her with fragments of parathyroid from a freshly killed calf.

She recovered: Cell therapy was born.

Niehans went on to construct a great shambling edifice of pseudoscience.

"Cell therapy," he wrote later," is a selective form of treatment which aims at

tors in the country use the developing underdeveloped

method.

No other country in Europe has anything.remotely approaching this number. European associates of the German society total 40 or 50, and a handful more can be found around the world.

Others, like Peter Stephan in London, use cell therapy but lack medical credentials. All, in a sense, are disciples of the master. Their explanations of cell how it works therapy and what it does frequently conflict. Schisms and heresies abound.

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Amid all this, one has to report that it is easy to find patients apparently sober and uncorrupted, who say they "feel better," and even claim a cure for chronic

organs or organs which are not capable of regenerating themselves.”

He decided that by some mysterious process, cells taken from animal organs and injected into patients would revitalize the corresponding human organs. He didn't know how, exactly. He didn't seem to

care much.

Niehans' dramatic use of parathyroid in 1931 was perfectly feasible, in itself. There is good evidence that such endocrine transplants can work temporarily.

It is possible that the calf's parathyroid cells could have survived, for a while, at the site of the injection doing the necessary biochemical work. By

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the time the tissue was rejected, the woman's damaged glands could have regenerated and resumed their normal function.

This is very different from suggesting that the injected cells revitalized the patient's parathyroid, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Niehans' sweeping claims to revitalize hearts with heart cells and livers with liver cells.

Cynics said that Niehans' ideas echoed the old notions of "sympathetic magic" such as Achilles eating the bone-marrow of a lion to give himself strength.

Attacks had no noticeable effect on Niehans. He was a lordly figure, sailing high above vulgar critics, the high priest that all the spectacular cures have needed in order to succeed. He didn't submit his work for the scientific world to judge, but made statements with a take-it-or-leave-it air.

The question of how the injected cells work was always left vague. Niehans said that perhaps they migrated to the damaged organs, or perhaps they stayed at the point of entry and worked from there, or perhaps they were broken down by antibodies and the cell-constituents utilized by the body.

At one time or another Niehans used cells from virtually every organ.

His clinic was supplied with animal tissue from a private abattoir. Sheep · came to be used almost exclsuviely. The ewe's fetus would be removed, then the required tissues minced up and made into a fluid, and injected into the patient within an hour or two.

Niehans grew rich and famous. He is said to have been consulted when King George VI was dying in 1951. He was called to the Vatican to treat Pope Pius XII in 1954.

His extravagant pronouncements about cancer toward the end of his career would have been enough to undo a lesser man. Sexcame into his cancer claims, of course. (The story of Niehans' own sex life. if anyone knew it, might help to explain him. He didn't marry till he was past 40; he had no children.)

“The rejuvenation of the sex glands," he wrote. "is the best protection against cancer."

Scientists shurgged their shoulders, but the patients kept coming.

Today, two years after Niehans' death, the cell therapy business is thriving at La Prairie, the Swiss clinic. The setting is suitably affluent and discreet.

La Prairie continues the routine established by Niehans. New patients arrive for examination and tests on a Monday, then have to stay at a hotel until Wednesday afternoon, when they are admitted to the clinic. Monday's tests are analyzed in time to have the injection program ready for Thursday morning, when the animals are slaughtered and the cells administered.

Patients stay in the clinic till the following Tuesday, then leave to make way for the next wave.

Cell therapy thrives, too, at many a humbler estabContinued on page 11-E

"I'M GLAD THE DOC USED THE BALD EAGLE IN YOUR CELL THERAPY, DEAR~~~ WE'VE GOT THE FUEL SHORTAGE WHIPPED!"

Ray HEARN